Students Turn Dead Ends Into Diplomas : Education: O.C. schools’ alternative programs put would-be dropouts back on track.

Jeff Jarvis was not exactly a model student. Hanging out with older boys, he smoked pot, snorted coke, took speed and even tried a hit or two of acid. He stole stuff, harassed people, got in fights once in a while.

What he didn’t do was go to school.

Two years ago, Jeff had a string of “Fs” but barely one year’s worth of high school credits. Now, three months before his 18th birthday, he has a diploma and is headed for college, one of several hundred would-be dropouts saved by a slew of programs around the county designed to keep youngsters in school.

Since 1986, Orange County’s dropout rate has declined nearly 40%. In Santa Ana, where the rate has fallen 62.2%, counselors tracked down students at their jobs and homes to encourage them to come back to class. Newport-Mesa Unified School District, whose dropouts are down 64.4% since 1986, started parenting classes to help support teaching efforts at home.

For Jeff, it was Gilbert High School, an alternative education program where students work independently and get more of their teachers’ attention. At Gilbert--the centerpiece of anti-dropout efforts in the Anaheim Union High School District--Jeff’s grades skyrocketed and he collected credits quickly enough to graduate ahead of schedule.

“I always knew I was good but I always did bad things,” Jeff said this week as he sat in the back yard of his house in northwest Anaheim. “For a while there, I didn’t want to be anything. . . . I was tired of it. . . .

“Everyone said I wasn’t going to graduate,” he recalled, diploma in hand. “But I feel good I accomplished it.”

*

Jeff, a lanky blond with shoulder-length hair, has lived with his parents in a one-story house on a quiet Anaheim street since he was 4. He is an only child in a family of college-educated teachers and school administrators: One grandparent was a district superintendent, another a principal.

Throughout his years at Maxwell Elementary and Brookhurst Junior High, Jeff was “perfect,” his mother recalled.

“An A-student. The principal would call and say, ‘We love having him here,’ ” remembered Diane Jarvis, who teaches eighth-grade English in Norco. “He hit high school and I don’t know what the hell happened.”

Jeff knows. He was bored. Bored with being good. Bored by the lectures in overcrowded classrooms. He got fidgety. He talked during class. Then, he stopped going to class.

“It wasn’t that the work was hard for me, I knew everything they were trying to teach me. But those little work sheets, they were bull,” he said. “If I went up to ask the teacher something, I’d have 10 other kids surrounding the teacher with different questions. . . . They lecture you about something you’re going to read, but most kids can read it themselves so during the lecture you don’t listen.”

First semester at Savannah High, Jeff got A’s in world culture and athletics, a B in Spanish, C and C- in English and photography, and a D in algebra. That spring, things got worse: Cs in world culture, math and English; a D+ in Spanish; Fs in athletics and photography.

“I wasn’t interested in it (school) so I picked friends that weren’t either,” Jeff said. “I was 6-foot tall, I had long hair, I hung out with juniors and seniors. They weren’t really bad, they were just older. So I’d try to do something to impress them.”

Sometimes the boys cruised to the beach on bicycles or went to the park. Mostly, though, they just hung around Jeff’s house, smoking pot.

They forged signatures on stolen attendance slips so teachers thought they had excused absences.

Diane Jarvis said she and her husband, a salesman, were slow to recognize Jeff’s attendance problems because her son had always been obedient and successful.

“He was such a good kid that you believed him for a long time,” she said. “He’d never done anything wrong. We’re talking about a perfect kid--Boy Scouts, the whole thing.”

Parents drove the boys to school and watched them enter the building. But Jeff and his buddies were watching too: Once the car left, they’d turn around and head home.

“We’d wake up . . . have breakfast, get stoned, watch TV. We just didn’t go to school at all,” Jeff said. “We were just getting in trouble all the time,” he said. “It made me feel important. . . . Everyone did it together.”

The summer after ninth grade, Jeff was arrested.

He and a friend were stripping some parts off an El Camino abandoned in the parking lot of a neighborhood hamburger joint when they spotted a new Honda Prelude that someone had stolen and stripped of its seats. The two boys plopped in some crates, sat down and zoomed away.

For a day, the pair zipped around the county in the Honda. There was a high-speed police chase, and then there was a night in jail. Charges against Jeff were eventually dropped.

He started 10th grade resolved to change, but soon he was skipping science to smoke at the supermarket, skipping school altogether for pot parties or joy rides.

Teachers at Savannah sent him to detention. So he skipped. Then came Saturday detention, which he despised--and skipped. Finally, he landed in on-campus suspension, sentenced to seven weeks of six hours a day in a sort of study hall.

“He was just headed the wrong way,” said Deborah Boyer, a Savannah teacher who had Jeff in a class.

Finally, he was busted for being high on marijuana in school.

“They pulled us into the office, checked us and smelled us and gave us the boot,” Jeff said. “I didn’t mind. Got a free day off.”

Jeff was sent to neighboring Magnolia High School, where he registered and attended classes for a day but never went back. Soon after, he was sent to Gilbert, the school district’s alternative education program.

*

Gilbert’s 900 students attend class only three hours a day. Classes typically include fewer than 20 students and, rather than lecture, teachers handle students’ queries in one-on-one sessions at their desks.

Students progress at their own pace, receiving “contracts” that list the books they must read and assignments they must complete, then tallying the credits and moving on whenever they finish.

“We follow the same curriculum guide; our graduation requirements are identical,” Gilbert Principal Emil Nolte said. “The difference comes in the delivery, the teaching strategies.

“We have no football, no dances, no drill teams or drama clubs or pep assemblies; this is a meat and potatoes program,” Nolte said.

That independence made the difference for Jeff. He sped through 28 classes in two years, and his grade-point average soared, from 1.20 as a Savannah sophomore to 3.76 this spring at Gilbert.

There, teachers did not disparage him for having long hair and wearing tie-dyes. They always had time for questions. And, to Jeff’s pleasure, there were no lectures.

“They didn’t put me down like other teachers did,” he said. “They took me for what I was, not what I looked like.”

The Chemical Abuse Prevention Program, a weekly support group where students talk about their problems, also helped. In CAPP sessions, Jeff and the boys he used to ditch school with would relive their behavior, realizing how stupid it was.

Sulyn Nicholas, a Gilbert English teacher, seems to know a different Jeff than the one who languished in Deborah Boyer’s classroom at Savannah. She uses words such as polite , well-behaved , and independent to describe the boy her district colleagues had nearly given up on.

“Jeff was one of those guys that snuck around behind the gym to hang out rather than going to third-period class--at (Gilbert) he’s not given the opportunity to make those bad decisions,” Nicholas said. “Jeff is a person who makes good decisions--as long as there’s someone there making sure he only goes 55 miles an hour.”

Now, fresh from a graduation trip to Las Vegas for a Grateful Dead concert, Jeff is looking for his first job, and just sent his application to Fullerton College. Even though he has always hated school, he wants to be a teacher--like his mom.

“I just want to make education better,” he said. “It’s not doing too good now.”

Anaheim’s Special Programs

Anaheim Union High School District has a host of programs that have helped reduce the dropout rate from 33.4% in 1987 to 10.9% in 1992. “You name it, we’re doing it, in terms of trying to accommodate,” said Supt. Cynthia F. Grennan. “It’s just a multitude of things.”

* Gilbert High School: Spread around three campuses, Gilbert’s 900 students attend classes three hours a day. The independent study program functions on a contract system: Students receive a folder listing the books they are expected to read, assignments they must complete and outlining the concepts they should understand upon completion of the course. As soon as they finish one class, they start another. Gilbert also offers Saturday sessions in basic reading and survival skills.

* Polaris High School: Functions similarly to Gilbert, but with students under 16. There are about 60 students enrolled. Polaris also offers a continuing education, independent study program, in which about 1,200 adults attend a three-hour class session one evening a week.

* Trident High School: About 500 adults who don’t have high school diplomas attend classes four hours a day, five mornings a week.

* Challenger Educational Clinic: Provides computer-assisted instruction in a small class setting for students ages 13 to 19 who have been out of school for 45 days or more. The clinic provides basic skills students need to phase them back into a normal school program. Students can have as much as 225 hours at the clinic; nearly 500 students pass through each year.

* The Learning Center: About 15 students at a time spend three to nine months in the program, which focuses on junior high school students with multiple barriers to educational progress. The center also provides parenting classes for students’ troubled families.

* Regional Occupation Preparation: Five districts, including Anaheim Union, combine to provide this vocational training program, which teaches courses not required for graduation but gives some credits toward graduation. Many Gilbert students also enroll in ROP.

* Chemical Abuse Prevention Program: Support groups of Gilbert students that meet weekly, with a counselor, to discuss teen-age problems such as pregnancy, drugs, and school delinquency.

* Buses: School buses that would normally return to the garage empty after dropping students off at far-flung campuses pick up alternative education and continuation students on street corners and drop them at Trident. These are mainly students who cannot afford monthly bus passes.

Source: Anaheim Union High School District

Researched by JODI WILGOREN / Los Angeles Times

Anaheim Dropout Rate

Anaheim Union High School District dropout rates since 1986: ‘92: 10.9% Source: State Dept. of Education